The Way of the World The Bildungsroman in European Culture

by Moretti, Franco; Sbragia, Albert

• ISBN13: 9781859842980
• ISBN10: 1859842984
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-09-17
• Publisher: Verso

Summary

Wilhelm Meister, Elizabeth Bennet, Julien Sorel, Rastignac, Jane Eyre, Bazaroz, Dorothea Brooke ... the Golden Age of the European novel discovers a new collective protagonist: youth. It is problematic and restless youth -- 'strange' characters, as their own creators often say -- arising from the downfall of traditional societies. But even more than that, youth is the symbolic figure for European modernity: that sudden mix of great expectations and lost illusions that the bourgeois world learns to 'read', and to accept, as if it were a novel.

Author Biography

Franco Moretti teaches English at Stanford, where he directs the Center for the Study of the Novel.

Table of Contents

Preface Twenty Years Later	v
Acknowledgements	1	(2)
Introduction The Bildungsroman as Symbolic Form	3	(12)
The Comfort of Civilization	15	(60)
Waterloo Story	75	(54)
The World of Prose	129	(52)
The Conspiracy of the Innocents	181	(48)
Appendix `A Useless Longing for Myself': The Crisis of the European Bildungsroman, 1898--1914	229	(17)
Notes	246	(26)
Index	272